


Tell Me That You'll Open Your Eyes

by UniverseOnHerShoulders



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Combat Magicks, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-10-16 04:00:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17542277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UniverseOnHerShoulders/pseuds/UniverseOnHerShoulders
Summary: The Doctor had saved the day - ofcourseshe had, that was what she did. But she isn't usually this injured afterwards, or this unresponsive, and as Team TARDIS do their best to be strong, they can't help but wonder... is this it?





	Tell Me That You'll Open Your Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> This is based on the ending of the Steve Cole novel _Combat Magicks_ , featuring the Thirteenth Doctor and Team TARDIS, and which I highly recommend checking out.
> 
> If you haven't read it, then (spoilers!) the ending involves the Doctor physically injuring herself (as detailed below) to banish the Tenctrama, aliens intent on harvesting dead humans. This picks up during a break in the novel, between her passing out and her waking up.

For the Doctor, there had been the battle.

The Tenctrama. 

The light. 

The pain – insidious, white-hot, and all-consuming. 

And then nothing.

 

* * *

 

“Doctor?” Yaz’s voice was quiet as she took a seat beside the Doctor, taking her friend’s hand in her own and squeezing it as tightly as she dared. The Time Lady’s skin was sticky with burns, angry and hot under Yaz’s palm, and she sighed as she looked down at the charred remains of the Doctor’s coat, still wrapped around her form as though unwilling to give up its time-honoured duty. She knew that the Doctor would be unconcerned about herself when – a small, dissident part of her brain whispered _if,_ and she tried desperately to ignore it – she woke up, but she would be devastated by the damage inflicted to her coat. “Doctor, please wake up.”

Nothing. 

Yaz had no idea what the Doctor’s body was doing, or whether it was doing it successfully. She’d run through the first aid training that she’d received at work – checked the Doctor’s responses, checked her airway, checked her breathing, checked her strange double pulse – and when her friend had remained stubbornly, bafflingly unresponsive to even the most tempting stimulus Yaz could manage (a slightly sticky Werther’s Original found in the depths of her jacket), she’d simply resigned herself to waiting out whatever _this_ was by her side. There was, from time to time, the same strange glow about the Doctor’s body that Yaz had witnessed on their first meeting – an ethereal, strange glow, like a whirl of starlight – and the Doctor would let out a long breath, and Yaz would run through her checks again.

Responses. Airway. Breathing. Circulation. 

Still no response. Slow, measured breaths. A sluggish, strange pulse. The Doctor wasn’t bleeding, which Yaz supposed was something, but there hadn’t been anything in her training about full-body burns inflicted by aliens, so she was at a loss what to do next. 

The Doctor couldn’t die – not ever, ideally, in Yaz’s view, but certainly not here and now. There was the faint, nagging worry at the back of her mind about how on earth she, Ryan and Graham would ever get home again, but more pressingly there was the intolerable thought of a future without the Doctor in, something which seemed almost too awful to contemplate: a future without adventure, and a future without wonder. She’d seen more in the past few weeks than she could ever have dreamt of in idle moments in her patrol car, and the thought of returning to her life in Sheffield full-time seemed impossibly claustrophobic and limited.

And the thought of a future without the Doctor _herself_ , without the woman lying beside her, rather than all she symbolised… well it was like considering a future without joy, or without enthusiasm. The Doctor and her ebullient, Tigger-like manner, enthusing about anything and everything without discrimination or concern. The Doctor, who was always pleased to see them, always keen to show them new wonders, always eager to… well, even just spend time with them, adventure or no adventure. To be around the Doctor was to be infected by her eager optimism and easy smile, until you found the worries of the day melting away and your focus shifting to wanting to please her, wanting to make her produce that smile again, wanting to impress her. 

“Please,” Yaz whispered, giving the Doctor’s hand a squeeze and feeling her eyes fill with tears as she looked down at her prone form. “Please. You have to be alright, Doctor.” 

 _Don’t let us lose you too. Don’t ever let us lose you._  

She couldn’t even voice the words aloud, lest the tears begin to spill down her cheeks and betray her feelings to Ryan. He was sat on the other side of the Doctor, staring pointedly over at the nearby Huns and Romans who were working to right the TARDIS, but both of his hands were wrapped tightly around the Doctor’s left hand, and Yaz knew him well enough to know that he was as worried as she was. Perhaps he was employing the same kind of tactics as her in similar stoic determination to not cry, only using their surroundings as a distraction rather than offering silent prayers. As she bit back a sob, she must have made some kind of noise or otherwise betrayed herself, because he looked over at her, and she was stunned to see that his own eyes were as wet with emotion as her own. 

“Hey,” he said softly, reaching over with one hand and laying it over her own where it rested on the Doctor’s, nodding down at their entwined fingers. “She’s not gonna thank you for the broken fingers when she wakes up.” 

“ _If_ she wakes up,” Yaz mumbled miserably, and she couldn’t help it then – she began to cry, lowering her head and watching as a single tear splashed onto the exposed skin of the Doctor’s arm beneath the blackened hem of her sleeve. A swarm of golden energy engulfed the spot where it had landed, as though curious about what the liquid might be, before dissipating and disappearing back into the Doctor’s skin as suddenly as it had appeared. 

“She will,” Ryan assured her in a fierce voice. “I dunno what that stuff is, but it was on her before – back at me nan’s, after all that with Tim Shaw. It’s helping her, I reckon. Like that gel stuff, only… sparkly.”

“She’s totally unresponsive, Ryan. She wasn’t unresponsive then.” 

“She wasn’t burned to a crisp then, though. Reckon you’d be unresponsive if you were all singed and such.”

“How can you be so… cheery?” Yaz asked, looking up at him and wiping her eyes with her free hand, caught somewhere between anger and awe. “How can you sound so light-hearted about this? She’s our _friend_ , and she’s hurt, and you’re cracking jokes like it’s nothing.”

“I know,” he mumbled, sounding abruptly contrite. “But like… she wouldn’t want us crying, would she? She’d want us to be upbeat and positive. And if I don’t make jokes, I probably _will_ cry, and I really don’t wanna do that in front of a load of Huns and Romans. They just about think I’m cool; let’s not ruin that illusion.” 

Yaz chuckled a little at that, turning her hand in Ryan’s and giving a grateful squeeze. “True. Can’t have you ruining your reputation.”

 

* * *

 

As the day slipped into night, Yaz bedded down in the back of the cart as close to the Doctor as she dared. She was wary of the prospect of accidentally rolling onto her friend in the night and inflicting further injury, or of causing her to overheat, but she was unwilling to leave the Time Lady entirely unsupervised, and so she compromised by heaping discarded cloaks between the two of them, setting up a low barrier to prevent accidental physical contact. Besides, although she wouldn’t have admitted it aloud – especially not to Ryan or Graham – whatever the golden energy was, it frightened her slightly, and the thought of it flickering over her skin was enough to make her shudder. Still, she would keep a vigil beside the Time Lady, resolute as she was not to allow further harm to come to her.

Despite the exhaustion lapping at the edges of her consciousness, she slept poorly, kept awake by worry and noise and the acute awareness of the woman beside her. The Doctor’s breathing had evened out, at least, and each time Yaz awoke, she could’ve sworn that the burns looked less severe, the Doctor’s skin slowly returning to its usual undamaged state. She tried not to get her hopes up, convincing herself that it was simply the muted glow of the starlight, and yet as dawn broke and the sun slipped above the horizon, there was no doubt that the Time Lady looked – at least in Yaz’s eyes – far more _asleep_ than injured.

“How is she?” Graham asked, approaching the cart and taking a sip of a steaming beverage that he was clutching in both hands. “She looks… better.”

Yaz held her hand out for the drink, whatever it was, but Graham only shook his head. “I urm… I wouldn’t, Yaz. We’re about 1400 years too early for Starbucks, this is hot wine.”

“You’re having hot wine for breakfast?” Ryan mumbled from his position beside the cart, sitting up and rubbing his eyes blearily. “Not sure if that’s the dream or the start of a major problem.”

“Yeah, well,” Graham shrugged defensively, then said with a smug grin: “When in the Catalaunian Plains, do as the Romans do, and all.”

“That was weak,” Ryan told him in a stern tone, as Yaz rolled her eyes fondly. “Really weak.”

“We can all be critical,” Graham sniffed in bemusement. “What I want to know is… what d’you think happened to the Tenctrama ship? One sec it was going to flatten us, the next…” 

“It was trying to jump back into limbo to break the venting cycle, but it couldn’t,” a familiar voice interjected, and the Doctor opened her eyes, sitting up slowly and rubbing her head. “I was overriding its systems with the sonic, keeping the vents open. When I stopped sonicking, the teleportation loop kicked in,” she flashed them all a weary smile. “Now the Tenctrama are out of reach, so’s their ship. It’ll stay lost in the gap between now and now forever more.” 

“Like my brain cells when you give one of your fancy explanations,” Graham joked, then grinned. “Welcome back, Doc!”

Yaz flung her arms around the Doctor, unable to find suitable words to express her relief. 

“Hi,” the Doctor mumbled exhaustedly, but nonetheless, her arms circled Yaz and held her tight for a moment. “This is a very nice hug, thank you. Yaz hug. Just the ticket.”

“We were worried about you,” Ryan said gruffly, in the voice that Yaz now knew indicated he was on the verge of tears. “ _Proper_ worried.”

“I’m fine,” the Doctor insisted, letting go of Yaz and rolling her shoulders, wincing as she did so. “Just needed some time to reboot my systems. Put myself back together. And now… boom. Good as new.”

“Witch,” Attila boomed, striding over to them imperiously. “Praise be, you have finally awoken. Your magicks box is awaiting you and your friends.”

 

* * *

 

“You knew you were going to be alright, didn’t you?” Yaz asked quietly as they stood in a corner of the console room later that day, the ship now hanging safely in the Time Vortex, well away from Huns and Romans and gene-splicing aliens. “You _knew_ you’d be OK?”

“I’m going to be honest with you, Yaz,” the Doctor looked at her with wide, guilty eyes, sighing before continuing: “I didn’t. But I really, really hoped I would be.”

“But if you hadn’t…” Yaz’s voice cracked, and she looked away, swiping the edge of her sleeve over her eyes, embarrassed to cry in front of the Doctor. The Time Lady didn’t need her tears or her sympathy; she needed her to be brave. 

“Hey ,” the Doctor said gently, placing her hands on Yaz’s shoulders and giving her a fortifying smile. “Don’t worry, Security Protocol 712 would have taken you three back home. I set it up a while ago so it defaults back to Sheffield, 2018. You wouldn’t have been stuck in 451AD forever.”

“That’s not what I meant!” Yaz shot back, frustrated to have been misunderstood. “I was more worried about _you_ , you daft woman.”

“Don’t worry about me,” the Doctor murmured, taking her hand and squeezing it reassuringly. “Don’t ever worry about me. I’m here to worry about keeping _you_ safe, because I am nothing, but I’m less breakable than you.”

“I don’t think anything is worth dying for, though. Especially not if it’s you doing the dying.”

“You’re wrong,” the Doctor said with a shrug, as though dying for noble causes was something she did all the time, and Yaz was reminded that this woman – this  _alien_ – had a past that they had barely touched upon. “Completely wrong – there’s lots of things that would be worth me dying for, and Rassilon knows, in the past, I _have_. People. Planets. Principles. All sorts of things.” 

“Well, don’t do it again in the future,” Yaz frowned, not wanting to consider that there were people in the Doctor’s past who she had died for, in an instant, and that she would undoubtedly do the same for them if need be. She wasn’t sure she would be able to live with that on her conscience. She knew a little of what the Doctor could do – change her face, change her body, change her _gender_ – but she knew that in a way it was still death, and she wouldn’t condemn the Doctor to that for her sake. “That’s all I ask.”

“I’ll try my best,” the Doctor promised. “Alright?” 

“Do you promise?” 

“I promise.”


End file.
